The Road Home Read online

  We went off to my bedroom and made love for a while, then the three of us gathered up a picnic and took a sketching walk along the Duluth harborfront. I told them about my stop here ten years before in the search for Willow, and Adelle wept at the sadness of the story, but then by late afternoon when we stopped at the same tavern of so long ago to drink and eat fish, she came almost too much alive and wanted to dance. The Swede took us off to a polka party at a Scandinavian hall and we had a fine, exhausting time, with Adelle stealing the show. I wasn’t much of a dancer, but then few of the others in the crowded and drunken hall were much beyond simply jumping around to the music.

  We were still in bed late Sunday morning when Frederick Morgan appeared at the door with two burly Pinkertons and a Duluth police lieutenant. “You’re a bastard, Northridge,” he said, simply enough. Adelle who had dressed quickly came forward saying, “I came here of my accord, Father. He didn’t ask me.” The Pinkertons and lieutenant struck me as disappointed at the civility of it all. In her morning mode Adelle went along meekly, down the steps, arm in arm with her red-eared father and with nary a backward glance. The Swede appeared behind me then, quite hungover, and said that I must be careful or she would kill me in one way or another. I said that was nonsense, but with little confidence.

  Sprawled there by the creek and cautioning myself against my canteen whiskey I stared at the assortment of dead leaves that had gathered themselves in the spring, with some floating, a few suspended in the clear water, and the bottom of the spring pasted yellow and dull red with the others. I had once tried to paint this phenomenon, unsuccessfully in the minds of others because it is not the sort of thing one can see clearly. There was the odd thought, absent for years, that nearly everyone was ignorant of how they see, lost as they were in the attraction for the simplicity of photographs, which is not how anyone sees. We don’t see all at once unless we work very hard at it. When I first saw Cézanne’s work I was dumbstruck at his comprehension of true vision. I recalled how Adelle had an eye for the oddities, the peculiarities in the natural world. In the orchard the first apples coming past midsummer are the yellow transparents and she studied them closely, finding with delight that none were perfect, and that we shared imperfections with the dogs that followed us around, keeping at a discreet distance during our lovemaking.

  Despite my caution I sipped again at the canteen and noted between the spaces of a group of ash trees that the storm had drawn closer. I felt overwhelmed by the sheer density of the reality around me, the water, the dogs, the impending storm, the still-warmish breeze pushing the floating leaves across the spring, the thicket perhaps fifty yards distant where I had found my mother, and lastly, this sandbank where Adelle loved to play as haphazardly as any mammal. We had camped here in a full moon on a warm August night when her ebullience came close to hysteria, and though I was young and half mad myself I justly feared for her sanity.

  All of our idle, even enthralling thoughts of sexuality are the weakest possible shadows of the prolonged act from the very first meeting to whenever it may end. Our thoughts and our art reach so feebly toward the texture of our passion. Now I can smell her neck and the back of her knee with the sand stuck to her damp skin, the sand trickling into her footprints, her head emerging from the water, the rivulet of water between her breasts, her breath the odor of the green pears we had been eating, how she wished to make love like dogs do, with her back arched downward at her small waist, and how she ground her face into the damp sand, whipping her long wet hair from side to side. I saw her teeth in the moonlight when she said she wished to be called Neva after the Russian river for reasons only God could trace. She climbed trees in her underclothing and sang quite nicely. She rode fairly well in the English style but adapted immediately to my cow horses. She claimed to have swum the Missouri River late one night the summer before on a schoolgirl outing. I did not ask her how she got back. It was the sort of question one didn’t ask her.

  When I got home from Duluth after the Pinkerton incident there were two dozen letters from Adelle in the scant ten days I was gone. Her parents had aimed her at Pembroke College in the fall, part of the alma mater of her father, Brown, in Providence, Rhode Island. Instead of this she wished to marry me and we would live in either Paris or Mexico or both. She certainly knew I was “rich” enough to do this or her father wouldn’t have brought me to their home for dinner in the first place. I was appalled by the idea that she thought me wealthy. Perhaps I was well off by inheritance in the terms of the society of that day but all of my nearly religious feelings about my art predicated a life of simplicity. To my friends at the Art Institute I was either “John Indian” or the “farmer” because of my agricultural background and my crude wardrobe. The examples of both the French and American artists I revered carried no room for the frivolities of society. The main problem she had to overcome, in this plan, of course, was that of her parents. She was sure she could change her mother’s mind, but her father was adamant over the fact of my tainted blood. There were more than enough references to her father in all of her letters to make me think of their relationship as unhealthy, a popular euphemism at the time.

  Meanwhile, she demanded that I come get her as she had tried to run away, been caught, and been confined in a private asylum for distraught and hysterical young ladies. She had been released on her promise not to run away again and when she objected to anything she was sedated. She was followed both to and from school and at her dancing classes by a disgusting Pinkerton.

  There was also a letter from her father begging me to “act a gentleman” as his beloved daughter was of unsound mind, a condition I was exacerbating. He was confident she would be fine if I would only stay out of the way. He then reminded me that my financial “welfare” was also in his hands, which seemed a desperate measure on his part. I showed this to Walgren who became quite irate and telegrammed both the bank and Morgan’s superiors in Chicago. I regretted this a little as it got him in some trouble and one of his colleagues was appointed my overseer. My regret came from my strategy’s having energized Morgan’s will to totally deny me any contact with his daughter.

  I had no immediate idea what to do about Adelle so I hitched up a tank wagon and a double team of Belgians and spent a week watering trees against an especially dry May. I could neither draw, paint, or read, so troublesome were the daily letters. She filled my thoughts moment by moment and my indecision made me so sleepless I could only rest during the full light of midday. I kept reminding myself of my father’s anger over my taking advantage of the obviously daft and mentally limited Norwegian girl, but then there seemed no similarity.

  I then did an extremely stupid thing by writing a note to say that I was coming to get her, too distracted and thick to suppose her mail would be intercepted, but then my own will had been fueled by a letter from her sister, Neena, to the effect that she thought Adelle could not possibly survive the “brutality” of her father. By then I was unimaginably distorted by love and sleeplessness and spent an entire night deciding whether or not to take along my revolver. I left it behind which turned out to be a stroke of dumb luck.

  I reached Omaha on a late May afternoon and went straight from the train to Morgan’s house where I was attacked by two Pinkertons emerging from the bushes before I got to the door. I did fairly well with them before I was sapped across the forehead and lost consciousness, waking late at night in the hospital with a policemen dozing in a chair by the door. What saved me from a stiff jail sentence for “criminal trespass” and assaulting the Pinkertons was that one of the arresting officers was from my home country and alerted Walgren, who arrived the next afternoon accompanied by a youngish reporter from a socialist-labor newspaper. The word of this almost immediately reached Morgan who then attempted to detoxify the situation to avoid social damages. He was in my room within the half hour, beginning a prepared comment about his great love for his daughter. I shut him up quickly by saying he was fortunate I hadn’t brought my pistol or I woul
d have blown a hole in his miserable head instanter, and if he didn’t bring Adelle to my room immediately it was he who would never see her again. He rushed off and Adelle was there with her mother for a short while, but then I had to be trepanned so great was the swelling behind my forehead that was split from side to side. I was in that accursed hospital for a full week before I left of my own accord. Adelle was my daily and nightly company, and it was her mother who worked out a not altogether satisfying compromise. She would bring Adelle to my farm for two weeks in July, but then Adelle must spend August catching up on the studies she’d missed with all of this “drama.” She would then go off to college in Rhode Island but I would be allowed to see her over Christmas, and again in March during a vacation period. If we still wished to be married in June we could do so with her blessing. Adelle was disconsolate when I agreed, but then the meeting was during the day when the rhythms of her peculiar soul were at full ebb.

  I went home then with my split forehead and a small hole at the hairline from my trepanation, stopping in Lincoln to order some new furniture, curtains, china, and suchlike. I aimed to present her mother with the living picture of a civilized savage. I brought in two painters from town to do the house inside and out, and hired a rather homely housekeeper to prevent temptation. I began to draw and paint again and the letters from Adelle were a bit more soothing with few references to her father, who had seemed a bit beaten in mind and spirit when I saw him the day I left.

  The two weeks of her visit were perhaps the only time of my life I would dearly wish to repeat other than fragments of other days. The only drawback was a heat wave which was difficult for Adelle’s mother who was slightly asthmatic. Other than a short walk in the early morning and evening she tended to keep to the den, kitchen, and parlor. She was the first I had ever met of that curious tribe of true Yankees to whom Boston was the capital and Providence an intellectual suburb. In the worst of the heat she spoke lovingly of her summers at a place called Wickford, where they would spend the warm weather sailing on Narragansett Bay. She assured me if things went well it would be a fine place for me to paint. I began to gather that she was the true force in the family rather than Morgan, both the source of their stability and money. It was inevitable that he’d prefer his daughter to marry an Eastern swell, or at least a Midwestern merchant, certainly not a half-Lakota artist. It seemed odd to me that Adelle’s mother would be so fascinated with my father’s collection of Indian artifacts which had not yet been moved to the sub-basement, their intended hiding place, but then I assumed that it was because Easterners took a firm interest in ancestry. At her questioning, I told her what I knew which wasn’t a great deal. She thought that it was melancholy that I missed half my “birthright” through my father’s intention to have me fully adjusted to the modern world. It was years before I understood this and then only in the most private rituals where ceremonies of the blood tend to emerge.

  The brief life, then, with Adelle took place out of doors with the tacit approval of our chaperone. We had our midsummer night’s dream in field, barn, studio, at the spring and along the Niobrara where I taught her during one hot afternoon’s swim to stalk waterbirds by keeping all but your eyes submerged, and then you could approach the bird with startling closeness. She tamed a Hereford calf so that it followed her on walks, and played the cowgirl helping myself and Fred, Walgren’s cousin who had become my foreman, drive the cattle through the gated windbreaks to greener pastures. Fred was always red-faced in Adelle’s presence, both because of her beauty and her frank language which she thought to be that of an emancipated woman. She was always eager to hear from me how the young women at the Art Institute acted, how “fast” they were in male company. It was obvious how much she loved her mother while she never mentioned her father except in oppressive terms, though never in her mother’s presence.

  Adelle had the strangest attitude toward mortality for one so young, and on our last moonlit walk together she spoke of a school girlfriend who had died of cancer the year before. It seemed out of character for one so vibrant to be flip about death, but other than for me, she didn’t care if she died or not if her life was to become wrong for her spirit. She had spoken of suicide with her sister, Neena, who was without intentions toward the act for the simple reason that she would be cheated of her reading. Adelle on a moment-by-moment basis could not distance herself from a single emotion, however slight. I’ve often thought we are not fated to be quite that alive. I can’t say that there was a premonition but on the morning that they left I was unable to imagine a future, whether for Adelle or myself. She passed me a lock of her hair through the train window and that was all, a not quite full smile and a lock of hair.

  I can hear a roar of wind to the north and I’m quite suddenly fearful about being caught out here, though caught I will be in the center of our largest pasture on the south side of the property, fallow and ungrazed so that the grama grass catches at my ankles. I can see Naomi’s house in the distance, far closer than my own, but I don’t want to escape the storm there because I’m a little drunk which might cause alarm. I reach the far side of the interminable pasture and the wall of trees just as the storm hits me broadside with both a violent wind and a precipitous drop in temperature. I haven’t been in this particular place for years but I recalled a pile of deer bones where a doe had caught or broken her neck jumping the fence. The bones were still there but the skull was gone, and I picked up a vertebra to study, then hastened along because it had begun to hail which stung my face. In the corner of the pasture where the shelterbelt was the densest, there was a thicket where Smith and I had built a lean-to and the remains of it were still there, offering a little shelter from the weather. I repiled the roof poles, pushing them together, and ducked under the front as a blast of hail rattled in the tree tops. Somewhere buried in the earth beneath me was an old tin box containing a photo of a halfnude dancing girl that Smith and I had hidden there, a boyish treasure that was a bow to a mystery. I could see the bare breasts in my mind’s eye, tilted upward and out a bit like Adelle’s.

  It was then my heart began to stutter wildly and I recalled I had forgotten my pill for the day. I took two swallows of whiskey but that sent me into a paroxysm of coughing with some of the whiskey going down my windpipe. The heartbeat seemed even more irregular and I curled on my side watching the ground whiten with hail, and then stared upward at the rolling and turbulent clouds, shivering with my drying sweat and unsure of how to proceed. It did not, for some reason, seem an unlikely place to die. My putative biography didn’t amount to much: he bought and sold horses, cattle and land, drew and painted for a while, married a wife named Neena and was not a good husband, raised two sons, and now somewhat looked after two granddaughters. This became almost amusing despite a heart that chattered like cold teeth. We are similar to beach stones that strike us as unique but are pretty much uniform. My dreams were my own, and early on the rare vision of art was mine, as were my loves. My son Paul joked that in geologic terms we all share the same amount of immortality. What we had supposed to be at least superficially real faded in interest. In the protected hollow between two cedars ten feet in front of me I could imagine Adelle until she took her specific shape, but again the smile was not quite full and I began to helplessly weep, and not the enraged weeping that came with John Wesley’s death, but that Adelle was there between the two cedars and I could not gather her in my arms.

  What I value is unknowable. What was the texture of her last hours? And did she think me a coward that I had compromised with her mother? Her letters in the two weeks after she left the farm didn’t say so. For Adelle the difference between all and nothing was very close. What was gathered together from witnesses was this: on a hot Thursday afternoon she threw her school books from the steamboat pier, then managed to give the slip to the man hired to follow her in the downtown crowd getting off from work. Just north of the city she caught a wagon ride from two farmers, brothers headed north toward their home after a full day
at the market. She spoke with them rather slow but amiable and this slowness was determined to be from the nature of the drug, laudanum, that she took along with her and that had regularly been used to sedate her. The farmers said she got off short of De Soto but past Fort Calhoun and merely stood by the side of the road at twilight. She evidently made her way down a dirt road to the Missouri and there on a grassy bank her clothes were found, and the body discovered by fishermen well downriver the next afternoon.

  Walgren brought the telegram and took the train with me to Omaha and I reached the Morgan home late in the evening. I embraced her mother, Martha, and Neena, who trembled wildly. They showed me into the parlor where Morgan stood beside the open casket with two of his business friends. I went to the casket and kissed her dead lips. I turned to go and Morgan followed me and I could not help but shake him like a rag doll in my fury. Martha and Neena stopped me, and kissed me good-bye. I did not attend the funeral.

  2

  JOHN WESLEY NORTHRIDGE II

  November 1956

  Smith came yesterday morning. Naturally it frightened me, but only for a moment. How would he know, or pretend to know, that this visit would signal the last year of my life? I lapse between petulance and awe over this man, my oldest friend when most of my friends, few though they were, have long since perished.

  I was sitting in the den close after dawn having my coffee and staring out the window at a weak sunrise, when Lundquist came in announcing that there was an Injun standing at the foot of our long driveway. Lundquist reddened a bit after saying “Injun” knowing how much such terms irritate me. He added that the man had the dogs buffaloed and they were sitting before him and had paid no attention to Lundquist and his old dog Shirley when they had driven in. I had wondered why the dogs hadn’t returned after their morning pee. All four of the Airedales were between middle and old age, and only Sonia pretended any vigor. She was a pain in the ass in most respects, but then so am I, though of late I have tried valiantly not to be so because of the enormous problems I will explain.